The hypothesis tested in this paper is whether the increasing inequality in recent years has had a significant impact on well-being among the population in Denmark. After a survey of the literature we use attitude variables from the European Social Survey in a pseudo-panel setting covering the...

Several reforms increased the state pension age (SPA) in the UK and equalised it to age 65 for both men and women. We use panel data and a difference-in-difference approach to comprehensively analyse the direct and indirect effects of these reforms, investigating mechanisms for indirect effects....

Social support is increasingly acknowledged as an important resource for promoting wellbeing. We test whether social support changes around retirement. We also examine whether social support moderates dynamics in mental wellbeing around retirement and consider both own and spouse's retirement....

The relationship between happiness and work is subject to an ever growing empirical literature in economics. The analyses are mostly based on large-scale survey data to measure subjective well-being. Whereas one large strand of research investigates the effect of job loss and becoming...

We use the 2015-2016 waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (Understanding Society) to look at subjective wellbeing around the time of the June 2016 EU membership Referendum in the UK (Brexit). We find that those reporting a preference for leaving the EU were 0.14 points less satisfied...

Using panel data from the BHPS and its Understanding Society extension, we study life satisfaction (LS) and income over nearly two decades, for samples split by education, and age – to our knowledge for the first time. The highly educated went from lowest to highest LS, though their average...

On 23 June 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union (so-called 'Brexit'). This paper uses newly released information, from the Understanding Society data set, to examine the characteristics of individuals who were for and against Brexit. Two key findings emerge. First, unhappy...

This paper studies the mental distress caused by bereavement. The largest emotional losses are from the death of a spouse; the second-worst in severity are the losses from the death of a child; the third-worst is the death of a parent. The paper explores how happiness regression equations might be...

This is the first study to investigate whether age gaps between classmates (that is, relative age) affect life-satisfaction gaps in adolescence. To this end, we analyse data from the multi-country Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) survey. We find evidence that relative age...

We first confirm previous results with the German Socio-Economic Panel by Layard, et al. (2010), and obtain strong negative effects of comparison income. However, when we split the sample by age, we find quite different results for reference income. The effects on life-satisfaction are positive...